Thanks to a pretty successful Kickstarter campaign (I mean, I guess it’s going ok), Matt Colville will be streaming his next D&D campaign. I’m especially excited because the campaign his players have chosen is the Black Company campaign:

A mercenary company, the Chain falls on hard times and regroups in Capital, the greatest city in this, or any age. There the small band must lick its wounds, recruit new members, and plot its
revenge… Read more.

One of the features of this is that each player will hold a rank/title in the Company, one of which is Standard Bearer. I, of course, then had to think about what this standard might be…

So what does the name mean? Well, Minauros is a layer of the Nine Hells, and home to Jangling Hiter:

Suspended above the fetid bogs of Minauros, it is a literal city of chain, with everything from the buildings to the ground itself made of chains or chain mesh of various sizes…there is no finer chain anywhere in the multiverse than that from Jangling Hiter.

So as well as sounding super fucking cool, the Chain of Minauros are named for a chain that cannot be broken: they will honour their contract, they will hold their nerve. In word and in resolve they are unbreakable. Which is what you want from a mercenary company! (Damn, he’s good at writing this stuff.)

One train of thought I like that is that whatever the banner might be the standard is also hung with actual chains. Maybe when you enlist you’re given a single link of a chain, when you die that link is added to the chain on the standard so the standard bearer is literally carrying the history of the company.

Or, maybe the standard is hung with chains and the link you’re given when you join is from one of these chains. When the company is small the banner hangs heavy with chain, but if you can see the standard you know you face the company at full strength. That seems cool to me. But anyway, let’s play with some chains.

I think black and white makes sense, their contracts are written in black and white, they honour things to the letter. It’s no nonsense. (I guess they could write their contracts in blood? White on black is just so stark and powerful though.)

I think some of the horizontal chains look a bit weak. But! I also think that they make the most sense, imagine a wall of shields all side by side, forming a single, unbreakable chain. This even fits with the ability the Sergeant gets. So we need to make that cooler.

What else do I like? The bottom right with the surrounding chain could work, it could be a bordure with the insignia of their employer in the centre.

The chain on a bend sinister is fun too, the sinister could be a nod to the hellish origins of their name. Or maybe when they fight for ‘good’ it’s a bend proper and when they fight for the less good it’s sinister. Probably impractical, unless they have an ‘are we the baddies?’ checkbox on their contracts or something.

Let’s play with that horizontal chain and employer arms:

I think the horizontal chain is much stronger as a chief. We’ve also got the arms of Haldrim to stand in as the employer of our company but I’m less enamoured of this. It looks a bit jumbled. And I think I’m set on white on black.

If you went with the chief you could use different chain patterns to denote rank or distinguish troop type:

It’s neat enough but how can we take it further. How about some more intricate chainwork:

I really like the fine rings, they reinforce the idea of standing strong together, you can picture the row of shields bearing this chain. I think this might be pick of the lot. We’ll see how I feel in the morning.

The centre one is riffing on the idea of the link to the hells what with the sharp, angular chains, and an impossible/unbreakable link at the centre. But I like it less.

The last one is what I’d choose if the direction was to go functional, mundane.

As they’re a mercenary company including weaponry makes sense. There are a few directions I thought of on this tack:

The first is that the Chain is stronger than any blade. I tried to do something with a hammer striking the chain and shattering but it was a bit too busy, the broken blade is ok but I’m not sure how well it conveys the concept.

The next is intended to show that the swords are bound/chained in your service. It also has a Damocles motif which I think works: when they take a contract there’s a burden of responsibility, and possibly, death hanging over each member of the company.

The last one is somewhere between the two ideas. The sword can’t break free from the chains but equally the chains are bound to it. Not sure about that. I prefer things to be less busy.

The final direction I thought of was having the chain bind a creature, the difficulty here was that the company could end up in service to… anything! If you bind a dragon or demon in your arms (not in the romantic sense) would it be awkward if you ended up in service to them? Not sure. I drew a shackle anyway:

I love these guys, they just crack me up, and the adventure is cool (longtime readers will remember I’m running my own XP Academy campaign).

In Asylum, four residents of a village where beasts talk like men have committed the ultimate crime: they murdered and ate one of their kin. In fleeing they end up at the titular Asylum but asylum does not await them there. Our heroes must capture the creatures alive and bring them to justice but fate has other ideas.

This year I’m trying to keep a diary of what I watch and read. In January I…

Watched

I started the year with a couple of rewatches, Life of Pi (I think the beauty is best appreciated on the big screen but I enjoyed it again on the small) and La La Land (still delightful).

Next up was Silence. It was beautifully shot, overlong, pretty harrowing, and an interesting exploration of the (depending on your viewpoint) nature, cost, or futility of faith. Adam Driver looks like he walked out of an El Greco painting, he was perfect.

As part of an effort to watch some classics, Casablanca and Rio Bravo both hit my screen this month. With Casablanca especially, it was interesting how much I could know about a film and still not really know what the film was about. I could name the characters, the locations, quote the lines, but I couldn’t have told you a jot about the plot. It was great, and reminded me how much I love Peter Lorre, even though his appearance was brief.

Free Fire was better than I thought it would be (and the facial hair lived up to expectations). The Lego Batman Movie was… something I’ll keep for when my nephews visit. And The Big Sick was lovely and funny, more Holly Hunter please.

Rounding out the month, I watched Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, and I Am Not Your Negro. I think if you don’t know that there’s something fundamentally wrong with racial equality in America (and elsewhere) then I don’t know how to help you. I Am Not Your Negro is often sad, at times brutal, and throughout a necessary reminder that something needs to be fixed.

Three Billboards is also sad, and brutal, and at times hilarious. Frances McDormand is phenomenal, Sam Rockwell too. I think those complaining about Dixon’s ‘redemptive arc’ saw something I didn’t, the sad truth is that monsters in the real world are human. A horrible person can try to do something good, a virtuous person can do something bad, real people don’t have alignments, it’s not that simple.

Read

The Comixology bug is still strong, but I’m trying to make a concerted effort to read more books this year. That said, I read the first two Atomic Robo collections, these were fun, reminded me of the early BPRD collections. The Sheriff of BabylonVol 1 didn’t grab me at first but got interesting, I don’t think it’s hooked me enough to keep going. If I spot future collections on offer I might pick them up. I found Captain Marvel Vol 1 so-so, I picked it up what with the movie adaptation in the pipeline but my knowledge of the Marvel Cosmic and recent events wasn’t up to snuff. Cap is a badass for sure, but I felt like I was on the back foot with the story.

The comic highlight for me this month was Invincible, Vol 2. I enjoyed the first volume just fine, but then something happened in this volume that made me double take and flick back to make sure I hadn’t missed something (a bit like the time I read the Red Wedding chapter in A Storm of Swords).

On Kindle I read a couple of historical non-fiction books: The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval Europe and Longitude. The Time Traveller’s guide was a bit of a slog, it was clearly well researched and referenced but severely lacking in character. Longitude was much more enjoyable; genuinely dramatic, peppered with historical figures and notable events. There’s a pullquote from a review along the lines of, “makes horology sexy,” which feels a little trite, but this was a genuinely world-changing development.

In fiction I read The Big Sleep, in a similar vein to Rio Bravo and Casablanca I feel I know all the tropes of hard-boiled fiction, but I’ve never read any Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett. Man, this was cool. To begin with I was definitely reading it in my head with the movie voiceover I mostly know from parodies but yeah, I ate this up. I picked it up as a trio on Kindle so I have Farewell My Lovely and The Long Goodbye to look forward to.

And on paper I read One Thousand Monsters, the latest in Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula series. If you’ve tried one of the earlier ones and it didn’t grab you, then this probably isn’t for you either, but they are very much for me, and shifting the setting to Japan only appeals to me more. Yokai as vampire strains is a great way to bring them into Newman’s world, and they are just as weird as yokai scrolls would indicate. The lads from Silence make an appearance of sorts, Popejoy is a wonderful insert. If you enjoyed the others in the series, or are a superfan of Japanese myth and cinema, then this is for you.

What I’d like to do is have the officially sanctioned Wizards of the Ordo Magica wear pendants identifying the school they belong to. Badge of office. Casting Focus. And most importantly, they will serve as “Papers” to keep from getting bodied by over-zealous Witch Hunters they encounter. And one “Initiative/Novice” Pendant low level Wizards use before they choose a School. Like a large obsidian ring with 8 smaller rings of various color metals. Kind of like a miniature version of Maester Chains in Westeros.

Oh, and in case anyone else can name the 13 Dwarves of Thorin’s Company but can never recall the 8 Schools of Magic, here’s a brief refresher:
Abjuration, Conjuration, Divination, Enchantment, Evocation, Illusion, Necromancy, Transmutation

While I’d like the symbology to be recognizable and evocative (heh!) of each School, I do want to avoid cliches.

So I took a stab at them. If they’re going to be pendants, rings, seals and so forth they need to be something easily wrought, cast, cut, or carved. Simple is always better, and we want to avoid cliches of fire for evocation, skull for necromancy etc. Here’s what I came up with: